Jochen Friedrich is Chair of the OFE Standardisation Task Force and OFA Fellow. This post was originally published on his blog.
I am sure many of you participated – or at least considered participating – in the EU public consultation on priorities for ICT standardisation. And perhaps several of you gave up because it was quite a complex consultation going very much into detail.
Today the Commission published an initial overview on the outcome of the consultation with quite some interesting statistics. It is available on the respective Commission website. Also a link to all contributions is given there.
Just some personal very first reactions after going through the summary:
What I find very positive is the high rank the EU Rolling Plan gets as an effective instrument in Europe for promoting standardisation work in support of EU policy objectives. Indeed, the EU Rolling Plan is highly inclusive, the result of collaborative planning with all relevant stakeholders involved, and therefore very much reflects reality as it comes to what is feasible and to including a proper perspective on market and societal needs.
Where I will be looking for more detailed explanations is the high ranking that Regulation and Mandating achieved as instruments in the context of ICT standardisation. Will be interesting to see what the motivation is for people to tick these boxes. After all, the ICT sector is highly innovative and competitive and so is global ICT standardisation. So why turn to EU Mandates and in which areas, and where are actual needs for regulation. This will be an interesting analysis of the results.
Finally, and probably most importantly, it is probably not surprising which topics got ranked highest in terms of priority: Cyber Security, IoT, Cloud, and Data got double digit ranks. But all other topics are close by with 7 – 9%. So bottom line here may be: For a healthy and prosperous European economy it is important to make progress on all areas that are relevant for the future economy, for sustainability, for society. And perhaps prioritisation is less relevant than anticipated? In other words: Does prioritisation, when done well, mean: identify needs to promote certain areas for some time, but clearly limit the time to as long as needed and always keep the kaleidoscopic view? Will be interesting to further reflect on this.
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